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Abstract. After more than 10 years in orbit, the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) European mission is still a unique, high-quality instrument for providing soil moisture over land and sea surface salinity (SSS) over the oceans. At the Barcelona Expert Center (BEC), a new reprocessing of 9 years (2011–2019) of global SMOS SSS maps has been generated. This work presents the algorithms used in the generation of BEC global SMOS SSS product v2.0, as well as an extensive quality assessment. Three SMOS SSS fields are distributed: a high-resolution level-3 product (with DOI https://doi.org/10.20350/digitalCSIC/12601, Olmedo et al., 2020a) consisting of binned SSS in 9 d maps at 0.25∘×0.25∘; low-resolution level-3 SSS computed from the binned salinity by applying a smoothing spatial window of 50 km radius; and level-4 SSS (with DOI https://doi.org/10.20350/digitalCSIC/12600, Olmedo et al., 2020b) consisting of daily 0.05∘×0.05∘ maps that are computed by multifractal fusion with sea surface temperature maps. For the validation of BEC SSS products, we have applied a battery of tests aimed at the assessment of quality of the products both in value and in structure. First, we have compared BEC SSS products with near-to-surface salinity measurements provided by Argo floats. Secondly, we have assessed the geophysical consistency of the products characterized by singularity analysis, and the effective spatial resolutions are also estimated by means of power density spectra and singularity density spectra. Finally, we have calculated full maps of SSS errors by using correlated triple collocation. We have compared the performance of the BEC SMOS product with other satellite SSS and reanalysis products. The main outcomes of this quality assessment are as follows. (i) The bias between BEC SMOS and Argo salinity is lower than 0.02 psu at a global scale, while the standard deviation of their difference is lower than 0.34 and 0.27 psu for the high- and low-resolution level-3 fields (respectively) and 0.24 psu for the level-4 salinity. (ii) The effective spatial resolution is around 40 km for all SSS products and regions. (iii) The results from triple collocation show the BEC SMOS level-4 product as the product with the lowest estimated salinity error in most of the global ocean and the BEC SMOS high-resolution level-3 as the one with the lowest estimated salinity error in regions strongly affected by rainfall and continental freshwater discharge.

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Abstract. Measuring salinity from space is challenging since the sensitivity of the brightness temperature (TB) to sea surface salinity (SSS) is low (about 0.5 K psu−1), while the SSS range in the open ocean is narrow (about 5 psu, if river discharge areas are not considered). This translates into a high accuracy requirement of the radiometer (about 2–3 K). Moreover, the sensitivity of the TB to SSS at cold waters is even lower (0.3 K psu−1), making the retrieval of the SSS in the cold waters even more challenging. Due to this limitation, the ESA launched a specific initiative in 2019, the Arctic+Salinity project (AO/1-9158/18/I-BG), to produce an enhanced Arctic SSS product with better quality and resolution than the available products. This paper presents the methodologies used to produce the new enhanced Arctic SMOS SSS product (Martínez et al., 2019) . The product consists of 9 d averaged maps in an EASE 2.0 grid of 25 km. The product is freely distributed from the Barcelona Expert Center (BEC, http://bec.icm.csic.es/, last access: 25 January 2022) with the DOI number https://doi.org/10.20350/digitalCSIC/12620 (Martínez et al., 2019). The major change in this new product is its improvement of the effective spatial resolution that permits better monitoring of the mesoscale structures (larger than 50 km), which benefits the river discharge monitoring.